Memories Abide

My high school experience was little more than perfunctory. Most of my minimal effort was spent crafting ennui into retrospectively grotesque but effective daydreams. Was I a "fly on the wall"? No, I was a dustmote nestled in the grain of an antique vanity of a quiet villa in Spain. At some point various people concerned with my life gently reminded me that I was expected to attend college, and that I should attend to the thought. And it was an interesting one, vigorous fuel for new daydreams. Mostly I imagined the women I might meet and potentially striking fame through the inherent virtue of my robust and cutting-edge philosophies, sans discipline; very little did I consider any concrete path to academic success. I saw a college advisor and promptly singled out the prettiest of her many brochures. Trinity University was some exotic oasis beckoning me from the strange land of San Antonio. 

Now I think of my time there as a beautiful, vivid dream. Academically I was fruitless but the experience was maybe more constructive and more constitutive of my character than the rest of my history put together. The foundation of my architecture is lain in Trinity-Red Brick. Its windows are fragments of the San Antonio sun, still smoldering away in my head. Its vaults the mottled canopies of live oak, cracked in jagged blue at the peaks, where the trees softly confer.

A live oak, sodium-vapour silhouette. 

Cover your ears, mom: Trinity University was like the summer camp I never had, peppered with but minor scholastic annoyances. My roommate (Preston, impossibly kind) and I made quick harmony and likewise befriended the two odd girls living opposite our sunny room's a-bit-of-wood-veneer-and-nothing-more wall. At some point during this first year we four packed up a little silver Saturn and stumbled down to Padre Island National Seashore. 

North Padre is a string of an island just off the Gulf Coast of Texas and it's laid out neatly in three sections: you have your long, uninterrupted strip of beach; parallel to the water and maybe 50 feet from it the beach abruptly turns a steep, grassy ridge which seems to serve as a buffer between two separate dreams; across the ridge and in the direction of Texas you are given an inexplicable spread of sand dunes. In some ways I'm a bit of a country-bumpkin. I haven't traveled much and I don't know if this particular geography is, well, very particular. But it is wonderful. You drive your car down the beach and you drive until you're alone. The water and wind and birds are noisy and relentless and wonderful and your phone doesn't work and it's just you and your friends and a small world suddenly become huge. And you walk to the top of this ridge which is natural but is so continuous it seems like a man-made dike and suddenly you see this blanket of dunes and nothing else and you immediately try to recall how far you really drove. I felt like we'd slipped through a rift in time at that oh so perfectly proverbial small-town Dairy Queen or we were just so young and happy and beautiful that the universe conferred us immunity for the weekend. Indeed we couldn't help but to ignore the dilapidated warning signs and explore the moonscape.

We slid and stumbled down the opposite side of the ridge, vaguely wary of rattlers, socks filling with sand as the grass fizzles out, and suddenly you can't see the ocean but even more strange is that you can't hear it. You hear nothing except for faintly the sound of the sky rubbing against the Earth and this of course only serves to make the nothingness greater. And you are given opposite versions of the same thing. This is an ocean of water, of life and noise and violence and change, and an ocean of sand, of stillness - all separated by a scraggly berm which acts as some enchanted diaphragm between. I am not being metaphorical, there is no point. This was the world and we saw it and we felt it. (It is there, go to it.) And so we are four silly kids joined by somewhat ridiculous circumstances and all products of a world of so many intricate forces and finding ourselves in this profoundly beautiful, unspeakably isolated dream. You cannot imagine the isolation but you should try, it is important.

And so we explored and eventually went through the beautiful comedies of tent-erecting, rattler-battling, hot-dog-roasting etc. until at some late hour it became dark. And it became so dark. You never see stars like this and there is no horizon and you feel that if you jump with too much force you will tumble out into the heavens and spin away through the galaxies forever. (And you pause to weigh your options.) And you lay on the beach and look at that dusty strip of the Milky Way vaulting overhead and realize that the threshold to the universe is the cold, hard earth at your back.

This whole episode is such a blissful blur for me, my memory is strange. In this darkness, just us four and the world around, I look down the beach to either side and the stars dust the beach with faint light, that pure whiteness of a few photons drifting just so slowly and softly like snow (and you imagine for the beach's sake that itself is really a fair cheek under the soft breath of a napping lover), but it's still so dark and the lines of the ocean and the beach and the sky so insubstantial that it just seems like you're floating in the sounds and smells and feels of everything, subsisted no longer in matter but in some perpetual motion device that is the mind or the spirit or whatever the fuck ever which was set into motion by the intricate and cryptic arrangements of matter that are beautiful and that we love dearly like a father and mother but that we feel truly relieved to be dispossessed of likewise. And I look down the beach to either side and I can't see anything which is to say - being hopelessly optimistic - that it looks like it goes forever and so I start running and I've never run faster than I did then. I ran and could not really know how fast or for how long because everything was so blurred together and soft that there was nothing to reference but the breeze on my face. It felt like flying and I mean that wholly, literally, sillily. It felt like I was flying.

And I go back to the tents and I am emotional and beautiful and in the dark I frantically kiss the first girl I've ever really been with and eventually sleep. And at some point in this dream I wake up and go to the beach to piss and I piss and as my eyes adjust I see something which is making me cry as I retell it. As the waves come toward me sent from somewhere out in the universe, and fetching bits of it, they crash and when they crash they light up. My friends are asleep and I am the only person alive as far as I and God are concerned and I swear to him that these waves light up, faintly at first, and spark like neon as they tumble and break. And I don't understand it but I do not think of it this way and I am not surprised because nothing else could've happened. And I run to the ocean like I am five years old and I kick the water and when I kick the water it is like kicking the embers of a fire and I run to the tents and scream for my friends to wake up. And we are four children held by darkness in some strange place, a part of some strange miracle which we have been slowly primed to understand and accept, running and kicking and slapping the water to send this inexplicable phosphorescence out in to the night, adding stars to the great deep cistern of the sky.

San Antonio sun





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